Taking Inventory For An SoC Team

What counts as inventory for an SoC team? Here’s an excerpt from the latest update of the XtremeEDA Professional Development Series where Aimee Sutton and I lay-out an exercise that helps SoC teams find out…

A large part of building a sound [development] strategy is understanding what the team is starting with. This is called a team’s inventory. People may think of inventory as tools, licenses, compute infrastructure and other resources but it’s more than that. Inventory includes people: their personalities, skill-sets, experience, history, and relationships. It even includes baggage from previous projects that could negatively affect the team’s future work. Inventory is a snapshot of every item and characteristic that helps/hinders the progress of the team.

Suggesting exercises like Taking Inventory was my way of nudging SoC teams toward the practice of doing regular retrospectives, as it typically done in agile development. We present it as a kick-start for a verification effort, but the scope could easily be opened up to include the rest of rest of the team. I’m hoping that if teams find an exercise like this useful, that they take it the step further and do it regularly.

If you’re interested in reading more about it, you can find the whole entry here.

neil

Q. What do you think of regularly Taking Inventory and/or running retrospectives in general? Would it make your team better or just use up time?